He says: ”We should not confuse ideology with message, nor message with meaning. The message belongs in part – that of logic – to ideology, and in the other part – that of irreason – to meaning. The logical message is almost always evil, lying, hypocritical even when very sincere. Who could doubt my sincerity when I say that the message of Salò is the denunciation of the anarchy of power and the inexistence of history? Nonetheless put this way such a message is evil, lying, hypocritical, that is logical in the sense of that same logic which finds that power is not at all anarchic and which believes that history does exist. The part of the message which belongs to the meaning of the film is immensely more real because it also includes all that the author does not know, that is, the boundlessness of his own social, historical restrictions. But such a message can’t be delivered. It can only be left to silence and to the text. What finally now is the meaning of a work? It is its form. The message therefore is formalistic; and precisely for that reason, loaded infinitely with all possible content provided it is coherent – in the structural sense”. (full text).

Success and charges: In 1954 Pasolini, who now worked for the literature section of the Italian State radio, left his teaching job and moved to the Monteverde quarter and published La meglio gioventù, his first important collection of dialect poems. His first novel, Ragazzi di vita, was published in 1955.

The work had great success, but was received negatively by the PCI establishment and, most importantly, by the Italian Government, which even promoted a lawsuit against Pasolini and his editor, Garzanti. Though totally exculpated of any charge, Pasolini became a favourite victim of insinuations, especially by tabloid press.

In 1957, together with Sergio Citti, Pasolini collaborated on Federico Fellini’s film Le Notti di Cabiria, writing dialogues for the Roman dialect parts. In 1960 he made his debut as an actor in Il gobbo. His first film as director and screenwriter is Accattone (”Panhandler”) of 1961, again set in Rome’s marginal quarters. The movie again aroused polemics and scandal. In 1963 the episode “La ricotta”, included in the collective movie RoGoPaG, was sequestrated, and Pasolini tried for offence to the Italian state. In this period Pasolini was frequently abroad: in 1961, with Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia, to India (where he went again seven years later); in 1962 in Sudan and Kenya; in 1963 in Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Jordan and Israel (where he shot the documentary Sopralluoghi in Palestina). In 1970 he traveled again to Africa to shoot the documentary Appunti per un’Orestiade africana.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were the era of the so-called “student contestation”. Pasolini, though accepting the ideological motivations of the students, declared they were “anthropologically middle-class” and, subsequently, destined to fail in the revolutionary attempt. Regarding the Battle of Valle Giulia which took place in Rome in March 1968, he declared that he sympatised for the policemen, as they were “children of the poor”, while the young militants were exponent of what he called “Left-winged Fascism”. His film of that year, Teorema, participated in the annual Venice Film Festival in a hot climate, as Pasolini had proclaimed for the Festival being self-managed by the directors themselves (see also Works section). In 1970 Pasolini bought an old castle near Viterbo, several kilometers north to Rome, where he began to write his last and unfinished novel, Petrolio. In 1972 he started to collaborate with the extreme-left association Lotta Continua, producing a documentary 12 dicembre concerning the Piazza Fontana bombing. The following year he began also a collaboration for Italy’s most renowned newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera. At the beginning of 1975, Garzanti published a collection of critical essays Scritti corsari (”Corsair Writings”). (full text).

Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the great Marxist homosexual artists of our time. As such, he met trouble throughout his career as both a writer and a filmmaker. His sexuality – or rather, that he was not closeted about it – consistently offended not only the Roman Catholic orthodoxy of post-war Italy but also the Marxist establishment. His Marxism offended Catholics, while his interest in Christian culture irritated Communists. (full text).